American Express unveils NFC, HCE and tokenization platform

American Express has launched Amex Enabled Digital Solution, a platform incorporating support for multiple digital wallets, contactless payments based on NFC and host card emulation (HCE), tokenization and express checkout services. The platform is designed to help both banks and merchants, Amex’s Mike Matan told NFC World.

“With digital wallets, what we’re trying to do there is make it easy for our card issuing banks to take advantage of the key digital wallets — Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay,” said Matan. “We’ve made it easy both technically and, if you’re looking at wallets like Samsung, we’ve simplified commercial terms.

“Tokenization really underpins all of these mobile payments. We use our token service for Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay. As well as being used by those key wallets, we open up the capability for our card issuers to use it for their own mobile payment solutions. As merchants start to look at solutions for card-on-file, our token service is available for the merchant side as well.”

Host card emulation

“We’re working with a number of bank partners on HCE — I can’t share publicly all of those yet,” he added. “As part of that, we’re working with them on how they can use the token service in order to make sure they have the base security. Many of these components we already have people engaged in. We’re seeing the mobile payment world starting to really expand so we really wanted to pull this together so that further bank partners and tech partners can work with us in these areas.”

“Amex has been very involved in mobile payments from the early days,” Matan, the company’s head of global network business, said. “We were launch partners with Apple Pay in the US a year ago last October. We’ve launched Apple Pay in the UK in July, Samsung Pay, Android Pay in the US in September, so we’ve been very engaged in mobile payments and we believe that mobile payments are really going to scale.

“Hence, we really wanted to create the Amex Enabled Digital Solution. We provide a set of capabilities which will make it easy for our partners — whether they’re our card issuing partners, our merchant partners — to take advantage of mobile payments as they start to scale.”

Focused

“What sets Amex apart — because we’re a network, issuer and acquirer — is that we’re able to bring a perspective on what is frankly a complicated market which is very focused on the customer,” Matan said. “We’re not just focused on innovation for innovation’s sake, we’re focused on innovation that has a real impact.

“We’ve started to see the base mobile payment products coming into being. I think we’re going to see lots of innovation over the next year or two and I think we will see Amex very much at the forefront of that innovation.”

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